Chapter 11: Years of Growth, 1950-1967

John Perkins, at thirty-six, was the youngest president in the history
of the university, at least since it became a land-grant college. A
midwesterner like his predecessor, William Carlson (and like Acting President
Colburn), Perkins also came here from the background of a midwestern state
university. He had taken his undergraduate and graduate degrees at the
University of Michigan and had never studied or taught in another institution
except for a year and a half on the faculty of the University of Rochester. He
had, however, left academic surroundings twice in his brief career, once to
serve as secretary to Senator Arthur Vandenberg and once to serve as budget
director of the State of Michigan. He had no direct experience in a land-grant
college; in Michigan the land-grant college is Michigan State University at
East Lansing, rather than the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.

Perkins's field was political science, and at Michigan he had not only
become a professor of that subject but he had served as secretary of the
Institute of Public Administration and, just before he came to Delaware, as
assistant provost of the university. To him university administration was not
only a necessity but an intellectual challenge, and he willingly accepted the
labors and the responsibilities it entailed. Perhaps he did this too readily
for his own and his colleagues' comfort; his approval was the sine qua non of
all appointments, promotions, and programs at the university. He did not give
it lightly, and he did not shirk refusing his approval when he thought this
course was proper.

He was a vigorous, strong young man with tremendous willpower and with a
temper he could not always restrain. Very ambitious for the university, he was
determined to raise its standing in the academic world. His goals for it were
almost limitless; he kept them in mind through a long working day that began
early in the morning.

Something in his nature, perhaps the same force that kindled his fiery
ambition and his powerful drive, produced also an autocratic bent, an apparent
willfulness that did not easily tolerate opposition. He could be very
reasonable, he could be persuaded in conversation to consider and perhaps
adopt another's view, but he could also become vexed and angry. Faculty
meetings that had sometimes been contentious in the days of Hullihen and
Carlson now were often turned into monologues by a dominating president.

Through his years at Delaware he had the assistance of an exceedingly
able wife who was intelligent, calm, self-effacing, and as interested as he in
the pursuit of excellence. Both devoted themselves to the university's
advancement, the one as hostess and intellectual collaborator, the other as
president, promoter, and, to the best of his
ability, as an instigator, a prod to greater effort and greater contributions
by students, faculty, trustees, and other friends of the university.

Besides Margaret Perkins, another close collaborator with John Perkins
was Hugh Morris, the elderly president of the board of trustees. Morris loved
his alma mater with passion; at his retirement banquet he quoted Daniel
Webster's famous peroration on Dartmouth College with such fervor that his
voice trembled. Elected chairman of the board when Hullihen (then sixty-four)
was approaching the age of retirement, Morris's hopes for Carlson, who was
only forty-one when chosen president, were disappointed by the latter's early
resignation. In Perkins he saw a man with the vigor and spirit and devotion to
raise Delaware to a greater respectability than ever before.

Possibly it was Judge Morris who infused John Perkins with the ambition
to make Delaware excel. More likely such an ambition was part of Perkins's
nature and the wills of the two men, one, at seventy-two, twice the age of the
other, fused into a single drive for improvement.

"Judge Morris and I soon struck up a very happy rapport," Perkins
reminisced in an interview in 1981, a few months before his death. "He was a
man who appeared to a lot of people to be very austere, and very cold and very
dominating; and yet with me he was very warm--I think maybe he had something
of a fatherly feeling towards me, having no son....We would sit by the hour,
busy as he was [Morris was head of one of the two or three largest law firms
in Delaware and had a very important corporate practice], and talk about the
University....I would go in and have lunch with him...once every two weeks, at
least. And many an evening after dinner Mrs. Perkins and I would...go out to
the Morrises and sit by a great fireside that they had. He was very lonely at
that period because Mrs. Morris [had just] died. [With his daughter Mary
joining in] we'd talk about the University, we'd talk about politics, we'd
talk about books,...and through him I got to know a lot about the people of
the State....He was almost like a guide book....It was really an education in
Delaware that he gave me, and always with the attitude of trying to be
helpful. We used to ride horseback together, too....Toward the University of
Delaware, he turned as if to something he loved. His feelings towards the
University were very, very deep."F#1

John Perkins was, as befit Vandenberg's onetime secretary, a Republican,
like most of the wealthy friends of the university in northern Delaware, but
Judge Morris was a Democrat of high standing in his party, which had once
offered him nomination to the United States Senate. The university, as
previously noted, had customarily been outside party politics, which were
often rough in Delaware; perhaps it was more important that Morris came from
rural Delaware, from Greenwood, in Sussex County, since at this time (and
until 1964) the state legislature was dominated by the agrarian region below
the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal.

With this legislature and with the two governors who served between
1949 and 1965, Elbert N. Carvel, a trustee, and J. Caleb Boggs, a graduate,
the university generally enjoyed excellent relations. The eagerness to serve
the state that the university exhibited after the
Second World War, and its obvious need of help in meeting the great demands
made upon it, both by the veterans and the new high school graduates who
sought higher education in numbers more than twice as great as ever before,
found a ready response on the part of these two governors, one Democrat and
one Republican. Legislators of both parties were pressed by their constituents
to enable the university to take care of what seemed, in Delaware terms, a
flood of applicants, and the university responded by agreeing--as had indeed,
been its policy before the war--that it must take care of qualified Delaware
applicants before considering any but a token group of applicants (such as
children of alumni or winners of scholarships) from out of state.

The university was also fortunate, as Perkins testified in his memoirs,
in the two men who most frequently represented it before the legislature in
the years of his presidency. The first was Carl J. Rees, who became provost of
the university in 1955, after the untimely death of Allan Colburn. Shrewd as
well as intelligent, soft-spoken, easily met, verbose but not revelatory, Rees
had made many friends in Delaware through three decades of teaching and also
as an active member and national official of the American Legion. It was Rees
who, with Warren Newton, had first interviewed John Perkins on their tour
through the Midwest in 1950, and Rees and Perkins thereafter worked compatibly
to the time of the former's retirement in 1962.

It was, of course, the president who would first present the
university's case to the Joint Finance Committee, and he would continue in
touch with strategic legislators; when more aid was needed he could call on
Judge Morris or other trustees. But for help in "face to face work with
legislators," as Perkins put it, "in convincing them of the University's
needs...and explaining to them why we did things one way or another or
couldn't do them some way someone would petition us to," the university called
on, first, Rees and then George M. Worrilow, who aided Rees and then succeeded
him in working with the legislature.

Worrilow was another old hand at the university. A native of Cecil, the
neighboring county in Maryland, he had taken a baccalaureate degree in
agriculture at the University of Maryland. Hired by the agricultural extension
service of the University of Delaware in 1927 as an assistant county agent,
his affable and cheerful disposition (despite the effects of a crippling
disease that left him permanently bent) and his folksy manner endeared him to
the people of rural Delaware, rich and poor, with whom he worked. As a result
he was steadily promoted through the ranks of the extension service until he
became its director as well as director of the experiment station, in relief
of Dean Schuster, in 1943; dean of the School of Agriculture, on Schuster's
retirement, in 1954; and vice-president in charge of university relations
(with the public, with the legislature, and with alumni, but not with students
or faculty) in 1961.

George Worrilow's success as a lobbyist for the university derived from
his manner and the friends he had made. He was no scholar (his only advanced
degree was an honorary doctorate from Maryland), but he had a natural empathy
with the Delaware farmer or villager or small-town merchant--and he proved to
have a charm for
the Colonial Dames, as well. Beginning as county agent, he helped people with
problems of planting, gardening, and lawn care, for example, whenever he
could, and people enjoyed helping him in turn.F#2

Just as George Worrilow had personally made friends in the state who
became, through him, friends of the university, the same was true of the
university agency with which he had been most closely associated, the
agricultural extension service.

Established by state action in 1911 but largely supported by federal
funds (under the Smith-Lever, the Capper-Ketcham, and the Bankhead-Jones
acts), the agricultural extension service had a presence in each county. With
Georgetown, Dover, and Newark as headquarters, each county had a basic staff
of three persons--a county agent (always a man), a 4-H club agent (a woman),
and a home demonstration agent, later called a home economics agent (also a
woman). Sometimes the county agent had a resident assistant, and there were
various specialists available for work anywhere in the state: plant
pathologists, poultry and dairy specialists, entomologists, nutritionists, and
so forth. So far as is known, the first black professional on the staff of the
university was a woman hired by the agricultural extension service as a war
food assistant in 1944. One of the women agents working out of the Georgetown
office in 1950, Camilla Washington, was probably the first black professional
staff member in peacetime; she was designated to work with "colored" families.
(Delaware State College, incidentally, also developed an extension service,
which, by choice, worked with families of limited resources.)

Although the service was customarily referred to as "agricultural
extension," there was a home economics element added to it shortly after its
origin, and therefore it was often referred to as the agricultural and home
economics extension service. In the 1960s, the name "cooperative extension
service" was adopted. The word cooperative had been frequently used in
reference to the program from the beginning because it was designed to be
supported by money from local sources as well as from the federal government.
Eventually the federal government set its funding limit at fifty percent, with
the other fifty percent coming, in Delaware, mainly from the state, but with
some funding by county governments.

The extension staff had the duty of working in close conjunction with
people and agencies in rural districts; the 1970 catalogue called it "the
informal educational arm of the University's College of Agricultural
Sciences." They sponsored 4-H clubs for youth and home demonstration clubs for
housewives as well as working with various organizations of farmers.

As agricultural interests changed, so did the work of this staff. For
example, in the middle of the twentieth century, when the poultry industry
became far and away the most profitable element in Delaware agriculture, the
extension service developed a close working relationship with poultrymen.
Extension agents like J. Frank Gordy, '28, extension poultryman, and Willard
McAllister, marketing specialist, played a part in the formation of the
Delmarva Poultry Industry Association, which developed out of a chicken
festival held for the first time in 1948.F#3 The DPI, as it is generally
called, has an institutional link with the university. Two former directors of
the university substation at Georgetown (first, Frank Gordy, and on his
retirement, Edward H. Ralph, '55) served as DPI executive secretary. The DPI
executive offices also are located at the substation.

Through the years the DPI has regularly supported poultry research at
the University of Delaware. Aided by these and other funds, the experiment
station has helped develop many improvements in the production of broilers,
young chickens raised and sold for their meat. The time needed from hatching
to marketing a broiler has been reduced from sixteen to eight weeks, the
weight at time of marketing has been increased, and the mortality rate has
been cut drastically. One interesting statistic reveals that where it once
took 4.7 pounds of feed to produce a pound of meat, two pounds of feed now
suffices. In marketing, too, the university has made a distinct contribution
to the poultry industry; for example, with the initial encouragement of
university personnel a live broiler auction was conducted through the 1950s at
Selbyville that was said to be the only such auction in the country that
operated successfully for many years.

The Georgetown substation is another example of the way in which the
university, through its agricultural interests, keeps in touch with the people
of Delaware. For some years the university intermittently rented plots of land
in Kent or Sussex to carry on experiments adapted to the climate and soil
downstate, since experiments in Newark were sometimes not applicable to
conditions in southern Delaware. It soon became evident that it would be
desirable to have a permanent base of operations there, and in 1941 the
legislature empowered the university to establish a permanent agricultural
substation in lower Delaware, providing funds and setting up a commission to
select a site. The site chosen was the John A. Tyndall farm of 310 acres
outside Georgetown, which was bought at public auction for $7,555.

J. Frank Gordy was appointed director of this branch of the agricultural
experiment station, which, like the main station at Newark, worked closely
with the extension service. The first research projects were under way in May
1942, and since then thousands of experiments have been conducted on field and
truck crops, weed and insect control, irrigation, and so forth. As in Newark,
studies have tended to reflect trends in Delaware agriculture.

Although Professor Chester displayed some passing interest in soybeans
at the experiment station in Newark in the late nineteenth century, more
intensive study awaited the arrival of A. Alexis Horvath, a Russian refugee
scholar, in the 1930s.F#4 Horvath vigorously urged appreciation of what was
then a new crop in this area, even persuading Fader's, a local bakery, to add
to their wares a soybean bread. Having gained experience with soybean culture
in Manchuria, Horvath was ahead of his time in the United States, but as
soybeans became a major field crop in postwar Delaware, many experiments were
conducted with them in Newark and in Georgetown. On the main farm at Newark,
the Newton Poultry Building facilitated studies of Delaware's leading rural
industry, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture established its poultry
research
laboratory (as well as a soil and water conservation field office) in
Georgetown.

The agricultural experiment station is decidedly the oldest center of
organized, continuous research at the university, and it and the whole
agricultural operation deserve a separate study of their own. Such a study
would show early emphasis on orchard crops and truck crops, together with
their diseases and insect enemies, giving way to interest in dairy cattle,
corn, poultry, soybeans, and, eventually, a new interest in swine. Often, the
interests of the professional staff had as much to do with the choice of
subjects of study as the agricultural situation in Delaware. For example, a
study by Professor L. A. Stearns reveals that though problems with insects had
not disappeared, research in entomology at the experiment station practically
ceased between 1908 and 1925, possibly because the director for much of that
period, Harry Hayward, was chiefly interested in livestock.F#5 This interest
in livestock, however, helped attract to the university such valuable friends
as Henry Francis du Pont, Harry G. Haskell, and C. M. A. Stine, who had prize
dairy herds. Much later, a generous gift from S. Hallock du Pont endowed a
chair of animal husbandry.

In December 1964 the trustees ruled that all of the "schools," as they
had been termed, should henceforth be known as "colleges." In making the
change in July 1965, the university also changed the designation of the unit
from "Agriculture" to "Agricultural Sciences," thus indicating that students
in this college were not necessarily planning to farm. As of 1974, for
example, only nine percent of its students came from farms and only seven
percent expected to become farmers. The largest group of graduates in that
year went into private business and industry, generally with an agricultural
connection, and the second largest group went to graduate schools to prepare
for jobs in research, teaching, and related occupations.

The number of students in agriculture grew over the years, though the
rate of growth varied, as it did in most colleges. There were 102 men enrolled
in the School of Agriculture in 1940, when the total of male undergraduates
was 599. In 1950 this enrollment had risen to 169. It was not as great an
increase as in the total enrollment, which had more than doubled, but this
slow steady growth continued; by 1965, for example, there were 277 students.
But then enrollments suddenly shot up to well over 900 in 1975-77; thereafter
the number shrank somewhat to about 700 in the early years of the next decade.
Incidentally, women had enrolled in this college once again. Alberta
Hendrickson (Baron) and Barbara Jacobsen (Neal) were graduated in 1952, the
first women to take degrees in agriculture since 1920.

Similar growth occurred in the faculty and staff. Agriculturists at the
university had frequently worn at least two hats and some had three: that is,
a professor in the college was also often a member of the station's research
staff or of the extension service staff or both. Early in the century when
there were few agriculture students at Delaware, the station and extension
service absorbed more staff time and classes were very small, but as time
passed, the college required greater attention. Until 1943 the dean of the
School of Agriculture (as it then was) also served as director of the
experiment station and of the extension service, but in this year the latter
two
positions were assigned to George Worrilow, who, probably because his
background was wholly in the extension service, acquired an associate director
of the experiment station in the person of G. Fred Somers, a plant
pathologist, in 1951.

When Schuster retired in 1954, Worrilow, as already related, moved into
the deanship, too, recombining the three posts temporarily, but taking Somers
with him as associate dean as well as chairman of agricultural chemistry. The
extension service was given its own director once again in 1962, with the
appointment of Samuel M. Gwinn. The college deanship and station directorship
remained united. In 1965, William E. McDaniel, an agricultural economist,
succeeded Worrilow in these posts, and on McDaniel's retirement in 1977, he
was succeeded by Donald F. Crossan, '50, the first Delaware graduate ever to
hold these positions.

The departments and curricula available in the college were gradually
expanded through the years. Where there were five curricula offered to
students in 1940, there were seven in 1970. Entomology and agricultural
economics had been added to the original curricula, but there had also been
much reorganization of departments and programs. A notable change was the
combination of three departments, agronomy, horticulture, and plant pathology,
into one department of plant science.

Ornamental horticulture is the feature of the Longwood Program, an
unusual graduate program established in 1967 with the assistance of the
Longwood Foundation. This foundation, established by Pierre du Pont, has,
since his death in 1954, administered the gardens built around his home in
Longwood, Pennsylvania, about sixteen miles from Newark. The foundation, which
inherited the major part of du Pont's estate, supports two-year fellowships
that are highly competitive and train students for work in the management of
botanical gardens, arboreta, and related activities. Richard Lighty, formerly
of the Longwood staff, became coordinator of the program at its inception.

Occupation of Agricultural Hall in 1952 allowed the various agricultural
programs of the university in Newark--instruction, research, and extension--to
be concentrated at the experimental farm. Agricultural Hall has since been
enlarged and renamed Townsend
Hall, and a new building, called George M. Worrilow Hall, was constructed
beside it in 1980.F#6

The Longwood Program is but one of a group of graduate programs
developed in the 1950s and 1960s that involved cooperation between the
university and nearby cultural institutions. The master's degree in ornamental
horticulture awarded graduates of the Longwood Program may seem far removed
from the degrees in the other programs but they all proceeded from a similar
desire, strongly supported by President Perkins, to link the instructional
resources of the university and the highly specialized material resources in
the museums and other showplaces, largely of du Pont origin, in the vicinity.

These developments bear a direct relationship to what had been
accomplished in chemical engineering, where Allan Colburn had been able to
capitalize on his reputation and his connection with engineers and scientists
of this area (by no means limited to Delaware, though both Colburn and his
successor as department chairman, Robert Pigford, came from the Du Pont
Company) in building a department with not only a national but even an
international reputation. The first museum-related program connected the
university with Winterthur, the ancestral home (and estate) of Henry Francis
du Pont, a life trustee of the university.

H.F. du Pont (often called "Harry" in distinction from other Henry du
Ponts), the son of Senator Henry A. du Pont, a writer as well as a politician
and manufacturer, was a Harvard graduate who, after an early business career,
developed a reputation as a breeder of champion Holstein cattle, for which his
estate gained its first national reputation. In the 1920s he became interested
in early American furniture and other domestic crafts, which he began
assembling in his home with the same vigor and intelligence with which he had
acquired a record-making herd of milch cows. After two decades of collecting,
his home had gained such fame as a museum of American domestic furnishings
that he decided to open it to the public after constructing a "cottage" on the
grounds as his new residence.

Joseph Downs, head of the American Wing of the Metropolitan Museum, New
York, came to Winterthur to be curator of the museum, but since Downs was a
shy scholar, he was joined by Charles F. Montgomery, a man of broad experience
in the antiques business and in public relations, as his assistant, with the
title of museum secretary. In time, incidentally, Montgomery too gained a
splendid scholarly reputation. He completed a volume on the furniture at
Winterthur that was a sequel to the work of Downs, who died a few years after
coming to Delaware; before his own death Montgomery's reputation was
recognized by his appointment to a professorship at Yale University.F#7

But it was as the chief influence in the foundation of the Winterthur
Program, rather than as a scholar, that Montgomery made his major contribution
to the history of the University of Delaware. He first arranged with Professor
Harriet Baily to have a course in art history offered in Wilmington for the
benefit of people associated with the museum. The course was taught by Frank
H. Sommer III, who combined the perspectives of an
archaeologist-anthropologist
with those of an art historian. It is not certainly known who first conceived
the idea of bringing a group of interested and able young college graduates to
Winterthur to study the collections while working on a graduate degree, but it
was probably Montgomery, who was quite pleased with Sommer's course.

When the idea was presented to John Perkins, he received it with
enthusiasm. Frank Sommer and Ernest Moyne (English) worked out a detailed
curriculum, aided by Dean Francis H. Squire, Professor Baily, and Professor
Henry Clay Reed (history), with Carl Rees (as dean of the graduate school)
assisting in its establishment and in early relations with the museum staff.

To recognize the combination of studies needed in the training program,
it was decided that two years of work should be required of all students and
that the study of objects in the museum, along with problems of their care and
of their presentation, plus courses in history, literature, and art should
lead to a special degree, an M.A. in Early American Culture. To insure that
the teaching faculty, drawn from disciplines hitherto isolated from each
other, would be exposed to the best scholarly expertise in the fields to be
studied, an extensive program of visitations was drawn up, with distinguished
professors and museum authorities brought to Delaware for a week at a time to
lend their counsel to those developing the new program and to the students, as
well as to give public lectures to all who were interested, including,
especially, a corps of volunteer guides that Montgomery enlisted to conduct
visitors through the museum.

In securing funds from the Rockefeller and Old Dominion (Mellon)
foundations to initiate this project John Perkins played a major role. Money
for student fellowships was provided by individuals and businesses of the
area. With sound backing, the first five fellows were selected in the spring
of 1952, and the program was begun late in the summer of that year.

The early success of the Winterthur Program led to the development in
1954 of a similar program linking the Hagley Museum and the university. When
it began, the Hagley Museum was only a project of the Eleutherian Mills-Hagley
Foundation, endowed by the Du Pont Company to take care of the grounds and
establish a museum on the site of the Du Pont powder mills on the Brandywine.
Abandoned as an industrial site in 1921, the grounds had reverted to the
ownership of members of the du Pont family.

The first project of the foundation was to establish a museum of
industrial history in an old mill on the grounds of the Hagley yards, site of
the second group of Du Pont powder mills, which were still standing. The
original site, called Eleutherian Mills, was still in private hands, and here
the old powder mills had been destroyed, though the original mansion and other
structures survived. It was understood that at the death of the occupant,
Louise du Pont Crowninshield (sister of Henry F. du Pont), this property, too,
would come to the foundation.

Even while the new Hagley Museum was being constructed within the shell
of the old mill a graduate program in industrial history was begun through the
cooperation of the director of the museum project, Walter J. Heacock, a young
historian who had been on the staff of Colonial Williamsburg. Modeled on the
Winterthur Program, this
was also a two-year program that combined training in museum problems with
graduate study in American history and led to an M.A. degree.

After the foundation acquired the Eleutherian Mills property following
the death of Mrs. Crowninshield, the historical library begun by Pierre du
Pont at Longwood was moved to Eleutherian Mills, as his will permitted, and
endowed by the Longwood Foundation. Developed into a major library of business
and economic history, it furnished a basis for the expansion of the Hagley
Program into these fields, as well as the history of technology. The
fellowships, originally only two a year, were increased in number with the
assistance of federal and university funds and came to include candidates for
the Ph.D. as well as for the M.A.

The Winterthur and Hagley programs gave the University of Delaware a
leading position, almost a unique position, in the preparation of personnel
for museum work. As in the case of the Junior Year Abroad thirty years
earlier, these programs were eventually complimented by being copied
elsewhere, notably at Cooperstown, New York, by the New York State Historical
Association in conjunction with the state college at Oneonta. At Delaware
itself a "Program in Museum Studies" was instituted in 1970 under the
direction of Edward P. Alexander, an historian who had a distinguished record
in the museum field, most recently as vice-president in charge of
interpretation at Colonial Williamsburg. (Much earlier he had been the first
director of the New York State Historical Association museum complex at
Cooperstown.)

Not only did this new program offer service courses in museum problems
for students at Winterthur, Hagley, and Longwood, but it also admitted other
graduate students, most frequently those in history, who could acquire a
certificate in museum studies while taking a master's degree in a more
traditional field.

In 1974 still another museum-related program began, one in art
conservation that was conducted in conjunction with the Winterthur Museum.
This three-year program leads to an M.S. degree in art conservation and is
quite unlike the Winterthur Program. Instead of being concerned with the
history or the aesthetics of art objects, it is concerned with technical
problems of their care and preservation. Graduates are qualified for
conservator posts in museums.

Like Raymond Kirkbride and Allan Colburn in other fields, Charles
Montgomery, through his enthusiasm to unite the work of the museum and the
university, provided the University of Delaware with the incentive that gave
it a leading position in an aspect of higher education.

Whether graduate students attracted to the Delaware campus for work in
chemical engineering, in museum programs, or in other fields had as beneficent
an effect on undergraduate students as Woodrow Wilson at Princeton and Walter
Hullihen at Newark had thought they would have is difficult to say. Certainly
they had some effect. Good undergraduates at Delaware in fields related to
these graduate programs could not but be aware of them. Even without such
programs at hand students in postwar universities were more aware of and had
more opportunities for graduate study than the prewar college generation;
having graduate programs at hand in
Newark, however, brought these possibilities even closer to the Delaware
undergraduates than they otherwise would have been.

Perhaps, as hoped, graduate students raised the intellectual level on
campus. But boys did not cease to be boys, nor undergraduates to act like
undergraduates. In 1951 the action of some undergraduates living in Harter
Hall attracted national attention to the university. Beginning at least as far
back as the fall of 1950 some student or students--possibly led by an
anonymous "Louie the Blast"--began setting off fireworks in or around Harter
Hall, sometimes to mark the passage of coeds past the building. As the season
went by, the frequency of these explosions increased, and so did their force.
J. Fenton Daugherty, the dean of men, whose home on Delaware Avenue was very
close to Harter Hall, complained, and so did residents of Newark, who were
often disturbed late at night by these explosions.

The complaints and the dean's plea with the students did no good, and a
thunderous bombardment on the night of May 3, 1951, featuring strings of
firecrackers and one huge cannon cracker, brought an ultimatum. Either those
responsible would confess by noon, the dean told a hastily assembled house
meeting, or all the residents of Harter Hall would be evicted.

The noon hour came with no confessions, and the dean kept his word. All
104 residents, including foreign students from India, China, and Nicaragua,
were turned out of the dormitory on Friday, May 4. Someone phoned Life
magazine, which sent a photographer and reporter to Newark and ran a story in
its May 14 issue entitled, "Who Threw the Torpedo Out of Harter Hall ?" Some
students added color to the scene by pitching tents on the mall. Others packed
their belongings in cars or carried them to fraternity houses.

Fred Hartman, '51, was quoted in the Review as saying, "Old seniors
never die; they just get kicked out." As the last student left the hall at
6:17 P.M. a final rattling fusillade of firecrackers was set off and a sign
was displayed that read, "Fireworks Show Cancelled."

Three days later, on Monday morning, Dean Daugherty and the
twelve-member Harter Hall house council reached an agreement. On a pledge that
the student leaders would be responsible for maintaining order, all students
whose conduct they would vouch for were allowed back in their rooms; all but
one or two returned.F#8

Perhaps this episode was more discouraging to Dean Daugherty than anyone
else. At any rate, a year later he resigned the worries of the deanship to
return to the teaching of physics. Since Amy Rextrew had retired in 1952,
President Perkins was free to recast the administration of student personnel
services. To replace Daugherty, Perkins brought John E. Hocutt from the
College of William and Mary, naming him dean of students, with authority over
both men and women. To the newly subordinated position of dean of women,
Perkins brought Bessie Collins from the University of Pennsylvania.

Gradually a number of student personnel programs, some of them new, were
placed under Hocutt's direction. One of the best steps taken was the
acquisition of Dr. Gordon Keppel as university physician and director of
student health. Keppel, like Hocutt, came to Delaware from William and Mary,
and under his direction the
health service quickly won the respect of students, faculty, and the medical
community in Delaware. Students no longer thought of the infirmary as merely a
place to get aspirin and a written excuse from class. Now it was open
twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, with a psychiatrist available as
consultant, and the new administration assured students of personal attention.
Faculty were amazed to find that Dr. Keppel would come to them personally on
behalf of students, as, for example, to pick up and later return an
examination for a student able to take the test but not allowed to leave the
infirmary. A health problem of his own had led Dr. Keppel to a college
practice, and he performed his role with real distinction.F#9 After 1956 Dr.
Keppel and his staff had a new facility at their disposal--Laurel Hall--at the
south end of the old Women's College mall.

Besides health services, other agencies placed under Dean Hocutt's
responsibility included admissions, records, placement, counseling and
testing, housing, financial aid, extracurricular activities, and discipline.
Eventually the heavy load of responsibility that Hocutt bore was recognized by
his promotion to vice-president. To the students he soon became, after the
president alone, the best-known man on campus.

The reputation he gained was as a very strict disciplinarian, enforcing
decrees that students felt unduly limited their freedom of action. The
prevailing philosophy was that the university functioned in loco parentis,
taking the place of parents in disciplining students. To what extent the
strict enforcement of behavioral standards reflected Hocutt's will or
Perkins's was not clear; apparently these two men were usually in agreement.
One freshman woman who wrote and distributed copies of a two-page satire on
freshman orientation called The Delaware Sneak felt so harassed by them that
she transferred away from Delaware. An issue of the Review was censored and
withheld from publication for criticizing a ruling forbidding resident
students to keep automobiles in Newark--a rule adopted to help solve a local
parking problem. A dress code, approved by the Student Government Association,
was strictly
enforced, and in the 1950s and early 1960s when students on many campuses were
adopting an informal attire that seemed scruffy to their elders, Delaware
students still went to class attired "properly."F#10

The number of fraternities on campus had been expanded after the war
with the formation of chapters of Pi Kappa Alpha, Delta Tau Delta, and Alpha
Tau Omega in 1948 and 1949, while Sigma Tau Phi was reorganized as Alpha
Epsilon Pi. However, the ban on sororities remained in effect for almost two
decades more with the support of a majority of women students and graduates,
until finally, in December of 1966, the board of trustees ruled otherwise,
feeling that it was unfair to refuse to women a privilege that was allowed to
men.F#11

By this time a majority of students were campus residents: sixty-two
percent in 1964-65 lived on campus as compared with only forty percent in
1950. Construction of many new dormitories had allowed abandonment of all the
temporary dorms like Topsy, Turvy, Boletus, and King's Row, acquired in the
aftermath of the two world wars. For a time a number of houses, once private
homes, had been pressed into service as dormitories. The Knoll saw use as a
women's dorm after the Carlsons moved out, as did the Johnston house on the
corner of South College and Amstel, which eventually became the French House
before it was torn down. Other houses similarly used were on Delaware and
Amstel Avenues, as well as the Curtis house on West Main Street, which, in its
turn, became the Maison Francaise.

Among the new dormitories, Sharp (1952) and Sypherd (1958) extended
Harter Hall and Brown Hall, respectively, to Delaware Avenue. Cannon Hall
(1952) and Squire Hall (1958) elongated the line of women's dorms formed by
New Castle and Sussex. Kent dormitory was added to Kent Dining Hall in 1956 in
the center of this line, and a larger dormitory, Smyth Hall, was built to its
rear, facing Academy Street.

Across Academy Street Lane Hall (originally called Colburn) and Thompson
Hall were built in 1958, and the first of three large dormitory complexes,
Harrington Hall, was built near Lane and Thompson in 1961. Harrington included
five dormitory buildings plus lounges and a dining hall: with so much new
construction it was deemed less confusing to call these buildings Harrington
A,
Harrington B, and so forth. An open plot in front of Harrington was christened
Harrington Beach by the students and became the scene of many student events,
from concerts to demonstrations, in the rebellious years ahead. Two more
complexes, Russell and Gilbert, arose beside Harrington Beach in 1963 and
1965. When Russell was opened it was said to feature a coed atmosphere; what
this meant was that men and women shared not only the dining hall but also the
lounges, though there was no mingling in the latter after 11:00 P.M. The first
coed dorm in the sense that women and men were housed in the same building was
established (in Harrington) in 1971.

Meanwhile a dormitory for married students called Conover Hall had been
erected on Amstel Avenue, near Elkton Road. Moving still farther west, the
university, in 1966, opened the first of two large dormitory complexes (named
for Caesar Rodney and John Dickinson) in a new location, on the west side of
the Baltimore and Ohio railroad tracks, not without arousing some fears in the
neighborhood regarding property values.

The long-delayed realization of Sypherd's dream and of the object of an
alumni fund campaign in the 1940s appeared in 1958, with the opening of the
Student Center, on Academy Street. This building, funded by private gifts,
soon became so useful that it was hard to imagine campus life without it.
Managed first by Edward Ott, who became director of admissions, and then,
after 1963, by Jack Sturgell, as well as by a volunteer student council, the
building contained a dining hall and a coffee shop, a faculty room, a music
listening room, a library and study room (furnished by the class of 1912),
plus such amenities as private dining rooms, a bookstore, a bank, a barber
shop, student offices, and a billiards room. Besides being the home for many
student social events, the building became a center for faculty affairs and
conferences.

From the beginning the center accepted the function of serving as a
cultural as well as a social center. Among the events scheduled were lectures,
concerts, art exhibitions, and trips by bus to nearby cities. The center's
popularity, along with increasing enrollment in the university, led to a large
addition in 1963-64 and further remodeling in 1965. In 1982 a large addition
on the north side provided space for an expanded bookstore. Many programs
sponsored by the center are actually held in the Amy E. du Pont Music
Building, Mitchell Hall, or elsewhere.F#12

The enrollment rose slowly, by fits and starts, to 1958, but thereafter
growth was steady, as a generation of "war babies" came to college, a
generation born in the troubled but prosperous period that followed the
outbreak of war in Europe in 1939. This growth in response to an increased
birth rate after the Depression was augmented by a startling increase in the
population of Delaware, mainly through migration from other states. Between
1950 and 1960 the population of the state increased by over forty percent, a
greater increase than in any state east of the Mississippi, except Florida.

From 1946 to 1957 the undergraduate enrollment hovered around 2,000, but
then student numbers increased from 2,400 in 1957-58 to 3,600 in 1961-62 and
6,500 in 1967-68. The graduate enrollment also grew--from 340 full-time
graduate students in 1961 to 700 in 1966. (The number of graduate students is
difficult to estimate, as work on a dissertation may be occupying a person
full-time even though he is not registered for a course.)

The pressure on campus facilities was so great through these years when
the university, as was customary, gave Delaware students a preference over
nonresidents in admission, that the percentage of non-Delawareans in the
student body declined from over one-third in 1954 and earlier to about
one-fourth in most years immediately following. Out-of-state students were
required to submit College Board scores with their admission applications
after 1956, but Delaware students were admitted on the basis of their high
school records and a principal's recommendation until 1964. Requirement of
test
scores from all applicants was especially useful after 1960 when the
university began a policy of measuring growth by requiring that a national
test (the Graduate Record Examination) be taken by all sophomores and seniors,
a policy continued through 1971.F#13

To take care of the increasing number of students there was a need for
new laboratory and classroom buildings, as well as dormitories, and for new
programs. Besides those buildings already mentioned, Francis Alison Hall,
which initially housed the education and home economics programs, opened in
1953; Pierre S. du Pont Hall in 1958 relieved overcrowding in Evans Hall by
taking care of civil and electrical engineering; and Sharp Laboratory, built
in 1962 and probably the last building to be constructed on the mall in the
traditional architectural style, furnished the long-awaited new facilities for
physics, as well as a temporary home for mathematics. Mitchell Hall, Hullihen
Hall, and the Carpenter Sports Building were all enlarged in these years, as
was Brown Lab for a second time, in 1960, and in back and adjoining Brown Lab
a new building for chemical engineering, appropriately named Colburn
Laboratory, was opened in 1968. Removal of physics from Recitation Hall
allowed that building to be turned over to the art department. About $300,000
in renovation work, funded by the state, was needed to repair the ravages of
time (a new heating system, fire exits, roofing, wiring, and so on) and to fit
the building for its new uses. Additionally, President Perkins, with the
approval of the grounds and building committee, but apparently without
consulting the art department, decided to make cosmetic changes that cost
about $75,000, taken from endowment income. A giant pediment, supported by
large columns, was added to the central front extension, which was refaced
with old bricks taken from the demolished Charles Evans house on North College
Avenue. New windows, steps, and rooflines were also added: the symmetrical
nature of the building made this change easy to effect.F#14

The first new classroom building constructed north of Main Street in
this century was erected west of College Avenue in 1967-68. Appropriately
named the Willard Hall Education Building for the founder of the Delaware
public school system, it became the home of the College of Education, which
vacated Alison Hall. Some of the crowding of the limited recreational area
provided at the north end of campus by Joe Frazer Field and the Carpenter
Sports Building was alleviated by construction of a new athletic complex that
featured the Delaware Field House, surrounded by a number of playing fields,
all close to the stadium on the edge of the farm along South College Avenue.

Funding for the new buildings came from a variety of sources. A few
dormitories were built from state appropriations, and one, Cannon Hall, was
built with money given by H. Fletcher Brown, but the federal government was
the major source of outside funding, through, first, the Housing and Home
Finance Agency and then the Department of Housing and Urban Development, which
advanced money that the university had several decades to repay from room
rents. (Allocation of federal funds to various institutions in Delaware was
made after 1963 by a Higher Educational Aid Advisory Commission set up in each
state by order of Congress.) Much
of the later dormitory construction was financed by revenue bonds that the
state legislature empowered the university to issue.

State appropriations were the most important source of financing for the
more purely academic structures (such as classroom and laboratory buildings).
One of these, Pierre S. du Pont Hall, was financed in large part by a godsend,
an unexpected gift from the Good Samaritan Foundation, established by a legacy
from Elias Ahuja, the Chilean representative of the Du Pont Company,
supplemented by the Longwood Foundation, which also added to grants made for
the enlargement of Wolf Hall by two federal agencies, the National Science
Foundation and the National Institutes of Health.

The largest and most significant of the new buildings, in terms of the
scholarly program of the whole university, was the Hugh M. Morris Library,
opened in 1963 to replace the old Memorial Library. The building is a memorial
to Judge Morris, who had by this time resigned as president of the board;
though enfeebled by age, he was able to sneak quietly into the back of the
room at its dedication on
April 4, 1964. It is also, for those who know, a memorial to the sincere
interest John Perkins took in the development of this strategic and necessary
part of the university.

Perkins had not waited long after his assumption of the presidency
before he made clear his advocacy of an improved library. Every state, he
argued in 1952, should have one great, comprehensive library; in Delaware this
should logically be the university's library. He acted as he talked; in his
first five years the library's holdings were increased forty percent to over
210,000 volumes; in ten years the book budget was enlarged 160 percent. To
assist in this growth Perkins encouraged the formation, in 1956, of the
Library Associates, an organization that replaced the defunct Friends of the
Library. Organized at the home of Elizabeth H. (Mrs. Caesar) Grasselli, the
group attracted 224 members and raised $50,000 in one year. Mrs. Grasselli was
the first secretary of the Associates, and Caleb R. Layton III was the first
president. Especially generous contributions to the Associates were made by
Octavia (Mrs. Bruce) Bredin, Mr. and Mrs. Henry B. du Pont, and Lammot du Pont
Copeland. Over the years the Library Associates has greatly enriched the
library collections with gifts of rare works and of expensive runs of valuable
publications.

Years before the Morris Library was built President Perkins decided that
the library needed a director with the imagination and spirit to make use of
the financial resources that he felt were available or should be available to
the library. Casting about for the proper person, he made an excellent choice.
The Scottish-born John M. Dawson was assistant librarian at the University of
Chicago in 1958 when Perkins, working with Provost Rees, persuaded him to take
on what amounted to a challenge to convert a college library into a university
library. William Lewis was moved to a position of limited responsibility as
archivist; he spent much of the next three years organizing the records of the
university and writing his valuable history, already cited, of the school and
the town.

Over the next ten years Dawson, with Perkins's loyal support, achieved
his objective. From approximately 300,000 volumes in 1960 the holdings rose to
about 400,000 in 1964 and almost 850,000 in 1970. Blanket orders were placed
in 1966-67 with many scholarly publishers, including most of the university
presses; in this fashion books could be secured at a discount while unwanted
volumes could be turned back.

In a very short time additional space, both for books and for the
increased number of students, was a necessity. The Memorial Library had
already had one substantial addition; aesthetically the results of this
addition were pleasing, but the exposed position of the building in the center
of the campus made further additions impossible without destroying the
symmetry of the building and of the campus. When a new site was chosen at the
side of the mall, the question arose whether or not to build in the style
established for the campus by Day and Klauder. The first plan submitted by a
new firm of architects was turned down because the internal arrangements were
unsatisfactory. These architects were dismissed and the contract given to
Howell Lewis Shay and Associates, who worked closely with John Dawson and his
staff in planning a functional library from the inside out; that is, they
began by ascertaining what needs must be met within the building to make it
function well. The architects prepared two plans for the facade, one in the
traditional style and one that was not.

The traditional style, it was thought, was too ponderous for such a
large building; a functional facade could be made to blend in with surrounding
buildings. John Perkins flew to Florida to secure the approval of Rodney
Sharp, as the veteran chairman of the grounds and buildings committee, to this
departure from tradition. Sharp agreed, and construction began in 1962 on the
basis of an appropriation of over $3,000,000 by the General Assembly. Occupied
in September 1963, though not dedicated until the following spring, the new
library provided ample work space for the staff behind the scenes, but gave
most of its floor space over to open stacks, among which reading rooms, tables
and chairs, student carrels, and faculty studies were scattered. Special rooms
were provided for micromedia, reference collections, reserved books, music
listening, and current periodicals, as well as a closed area for rare books
and manuscripts. The feature that distinguished the Morris Library from the
Memorial Library besides its greater size was the provision for open stacks
with seating for students scattered throughout. Dawson had insisted on having
the basement fully excavated, even though originally only a small part of it
was used; before many years what might have seemed to be "Dawson's folly"
proved an invaluable asset since it provided space for expansion.

For the achievement of a library of stature befitting a university it
could be said that Perkins raised the money and Dawson spent it. The credit
belongs to them both.F#15

Increasing numbers of students encouraged the introduction of new
programs, just as they made necessary the construction of new buildings. Some
of these new programs developed within existing departments; some spawned new
departments; some led to the organization of new colleges.

The biology department, which had already developed a program in medical
technology, became the basis for two other new programs--nursing and physical
therapy. The nursing program, instituted with the cooperation of the
Wilmington hospitals and leading to both a degree and a nursing diploma,
separated from biology and became, first, a department of its own (in 1963)
and then a separate college (in 1966). Physical therapy, on the other hand,
like medical technology, remained connected with biology except for a few
years when it was part of a separate division--health sciences.

In the immediate postwar period economics and business administration
was the name of a department in the School of Arts and Science. The prewar
chairman, Joseph S. Gould, who had been away on government service, returned
to the department briefly but resigned when President Carlson would not
approve an extended leave allowing him to work for international agencies in
Southeast Asia. Under his successor, Charles N. Lanier, Jr., the department
grew rapidly in enrollment and included accounting and secretarial studies
among its offerings, while also operating the Bureau of Economics and Business
Research as a research arm. Ruben Austin succeeded Lanier as chairman in 1961
and became dean when the department was made an independent school in 1962. As
in the case of the other existing schools, its title was changed to college in
1965.

Whereas the College of Nursing had its origins in the department of
biological science and the College of Business and Economics also grew out of
a department, the university's program in urban affairs began with
interdepartmental connections. In 1961 the Ford Foundation provided funds with
which to begin an urban services program, soon organized as the Division of
Urban Affairs, under the direction of Edward Overman. This division, which
entered into contracts with the Greater Wilmington Development Council and
with the City of Newark, drew its staff from several departments, especially
political science, sociology, and economics. With continued grants from the
Ford Foundation, it was able to provide fellowships in several social science
fields, though eventually it accepted students of its own--graduate students
only, however--as it advanced toward college status.

While the university moved to offer programs in nursing and in urban
affairs and to expand its work in business and economics, it purposely avoided
development of programs in two fields frequently found in state
universities--medicine and law. The failure to establish a law school may well
have been a missed opportunity, but with four law schools in the Philadelphia
area (Penn, Temple, Villanova, and the Rutgers Law School in Camden), the need
did not seem pressing in the early 1960s.

Law schools are not necessarily a heavy financial burden; medical
schools are. Therein lay the problem when, in the late 1950s, a number of
Delawareans, notably including Dr. James E. Marvil, '26, of Laurel and Lewes,
urged the establishment of a Delaware medical school, arguing that too few
physicians were being trained in existing schools and that Delaware was not
attracting its share of them. President Perkins responded that national
studies did not report any particular need of medical training here, but
expressed an interest in
establishing a two-year medical school (from which students would go elsewhere
to complete their training) if new funds from private sources became available
to finance it.

Perkins felt strongly that the university's resources should not be
spread too thin, that endowment funds acquired through the generosity of such
friends as Fletcher Brown and Rodney Sharp should be used to improve the
existing university, which had suffered from inadequate resources far too
long. It was, he felt, his mission to lift it from mediocrity to a position of
distinction. In this way, as he saw it, the university could best serve the
people of Delaware. There were five quite creditable or even distinguished
medical schools in Philadelphia (the University of Pennsylvania, Temple,
Jefferson, Women's Medical College, and Hahnemann) and two more in Baltimore
(Johns Hopkins and the University of Maryland). To start another medical
school would dangerously deplete this university's newly acquired
endowment.F#16

Stimulated particularly by a shortage of physicians in rural Delaware,
the agitation continued. Finally, in 1964, the Delaware Academy of Medicine
appointed a commission to study the problem, its cost underwritten by Walter
S. Carpenter, Jr., by this time an ex-president of the university's board of
trustees. The chairman of the commission was Kenneth E. Penrod, vice-president
for medical affairs at West Virginia University, and other members came from
the medical schools at Cornell, Dartmouth, Alabama, and Yale, and from the
Bryn Mawr Hospital. The conclusions of the committee, embodied in what was
called the Penrod Report, calmed the controversy.

The committee did not recommend establishment of a medical school for at
least a decade, but it recommended that both the state and the university
should, in their long-range planning, consider the possibility of establishing
such a school in ten to fifteen years. They preferred that this planning
envision a full four-year school; a two-year school should be considered only
as a possible phase in the development of a school that would provide complete
training for a doctor. Since the problems of a shortage of physicians were
indigenous to all rural areas, a citizens committee, including representatives
from the university and from the medical profession, should study what might
be done to provide adequate health care in rural Delaware. The Penrod
committee also recommended the development of postdoctoral educational
programs in the Wilmington hospitals, perhaps through close ties with one or
more of the medical schools of Philadelphia; such a program might help attract
young doctors to Delaware.F#17

Some assistance to young Delawareans desiring training in medicine or
law--as well as in certain other subjects--had already been provided before
the Penrod Report was released. This was by means of a Delaware statute
establishing the Higher Education Advisory Commission in 1963. Certain funds
were set up by the legislature--and this program was continued through
subsequent years--to assist qualified Delawareans going outside of the state
for training at the college or university level that was not available within
Delaware at any accredited institution. Intended particularly to offer
financial aid to Delawareans studying law or medicine, it could also
be called on for assistance with veterinary, architectural, forestry, or even
Chinese studies--with any reputable program not available in the state. Any
student applying for help had to submit a full statement of his plans and his
financial resources; the commission tried to help students to the extent
necessary as far as its appropriation would permit.

For the time little more was done by the university regarding medical
education, but the subject arose again before the ten-to-fifteen-year period
mentioned in the Penrod Report expired.

Establishment of doctoral programs in chemical engineering and chemistry
and of museum programs were examples of how the university took advantage of
its location, as was its connection with the Delmarva Poultry Institute. Other
programs also followed the emphasis placed by both Carlson and Perkins on
development of the educational interests of individuals and institutions
nearby.

For example, a revived program in astronomy appeared through the help of
Mount Cuba Astronomical Observatory, Inc., an institution incorporated in 1958
by a group of Du Pont Company scientists with astronomy as a hobby. After they
constructed a permanent observatory building in 1963 they turned to the
university and (by helping find a suitable person and raising funds to pay his
salary for several years) encouraged it to add an astronomer (Richard Herr) to
the department of physics.

Astronomy had an ancient tradition at Delaware, running back to Daniel
Kirkwood in the 1850s, and had usually been taught by a professor of
mathematics, as, for instance, George Harter. But when revived in 1964, it was
connected with physics, and after a few years the Mount Cuba Observatory
raised funds for a second astronomer. They also established an Annie Jump
Cannon Fund, named--like a dormitory on the campus--for a distinguished
astronomer who was a native of Delaware. The fund was intended to endow a
chair in astronomy eventually; meanwhile it helped with postdoctoral
fellowships.

Similarly the Eleutherian Mills-Hagley Foundation in the 1950s helped
the history department of the university enter the hitherto-neglected fields
of the history of science and technology by providing funds that helped secure
the services of L. Pearce Williams. He left in a few years to return to
Cornell, his alma mater, but other appointments followed, often made as joint
appointments with the foundation, that enabled the university to acquire a
national reputation in this field.

Other new ventures of the period included the department of art history,
separated from the department of art in 1966 and able to profit from its
proximity to the Winterthur Museum. In a relatively few years, art history,
under the leadership of William Homer, became one of the strongest departments
in the College of Arts and Science. Existence of a cooperative graduate
program with the Winterthur Museum helped inspire the development of an
interdepartmental American studies program, started in 1953 under the
direction of H. Clay Reed (history) and later of Charles Bohner (English); the
departments represented by these two men were mainstays of this program,
although many other departments in the humanities and social sciences shared
in it. Another
interdepartmental program, international relations, was centered in the
political science department.

The Delaware Geological Survey was established by the legislature in
1951 and organized as a unit of the university, which appoints the staff that
works under the state geologist. The survey is separate from the department of
geology but has a close relationship with it. Both have been quartered since
1969 in Penny Hall, the former home of the Biomedical Research Foundation of
the Franklin Institute, of Philadelphia. The university purchased the building
from the foundation, which had it as a gift from the family of Irenee du Pont;
appropriately, the building now houses the valuable Irenee du Pont mineral
collection.

Many of the new agencies and bureaus on campus were primarily
research-centered, like the Computing Center, the Water Resources Center, and
the Fels Center for Group Dynamics. The last-named group, supported by the
Fels Foundation, of Philadelphia, moved in 1955 from Temple University, where
it had recently been organized, to the Delaware campus. Concerned with
studying the hostilities that arise between groups in society, it received an
appropriation of about $150,000 a year from the Fels Foundation, in addition
to smaller grants from other sources. While the Fels staff had full-time
support for research, they received adjunct appointments in the psychology
department; their coming doubled the number of psychologists at Delaware and
encouraged the introduction of a doctoral program in the behavioral sciences.

In 1959 a dispute between President Perkins and the Fels Foundation over
the direction of the program led to the withdrawal of foundation support. No
faculty member, Perkins declared in his 1961 report, should be wholly divorced
from teaching, and care should be taken not to become so dependent on research
funds that the university could not meet its full payroll if they were
suddenly withdrawn. Perhaps it was the withdrawal of the Fels subvention in
1959 that led him to this conclusion. At any rate, though the research group
continued its work for six more years, as the Center for Research in Social
Behavior, it was gradually merged with the psychology department before being
finally suspended in 1965.

Other agencies appeared on campus, like the Writing Center and the
Instructional Resources Center (which prepared audio-visual materials for the
classroom) that were student-centered and justified by the increasing
enrollment. One unusual feature of the university's cultural program for
students was the establishment of a resident string quartet. This highly
popular ensemble, which eventually adopted the name of Delos String Quartet,
gives concerts at various places on campus and through the state. The quartet,
as well as the Writing Center, owed its origin on campus to private funds.
Private donors also added very significantly to the university's art
collection, particularly by the purchase of works by artists of this region.

Another new agency called for by the times was the Long-Range Planning
Office, set up in February 1957. Its area of service was internal, to prepare
for needed growth in campus facilities. An agency with a wholly outward
perspective was the Division of Technical Services, established ten years
later with the aid of a group
called SCORE, the Service Corps of Retired Executives, which, with the
encouragement of the U.S. Department of Commerce, offered help to small
industries of the area.

In the first ten years of the doctoral program, 1948-58, the university
awarded 193 doctorates. After averaging 20 a year through 1963, the number
increased suddenly to 50 in 1967.F#18

John Perkins was not discouraged in the least by this growth of the
university per se. He not only thought that a bigger university would be a
better university, he said so. "Bigger will mean better," he wrote in his 1958
report. Coming from the University of Michigan it was not strange that he
found the pattern for Delaware's future to be somewhat akin to what he had
known. He realized, however, that the true key to distinction lay not in the
programs, but in the personnel of the university. For many years he insisted
on interviewing personally the candidates for all faculty positions, and
though the university finally grew too large and faculty additions became too
numerous to allow him to meet candidates for the lower ranks, his interest in
the faculty as individuals was well known, if not always appreciated.

In interviews he tried to make candidates acquainted with his ambitions
for the university. If a young candidate asked about retirement benefits,
Perkins was taken aback. He would frankly, if inelegantly, tell candidates he
wanted people with "fire in their belly," just as he would tell students, at
campus ceremonies, that he wanted them to become "cornerpost citizens."

Perkins's dislike of having a young candidate inquire about retirement
benefits did not mean he gave little attention to benefits. On the contrary,
he worked assiduously to increase salaries and benefits because of the
importance he placed upon recruiting good scholars. Besides improving faculty
salaries, he took measures to bring faculty under Social Security, improved
life insurance benefits, and added major medical insurance to the protection
afforded faculty. On the other hand, in 1953 he had the trustees reduce the
mandatory retirement age from 70 to 65. This was dismaying to some of the
faculty who had made plans, as, for example, by mortgages on their homes, on
the basis of a later retirement. A few carried their protest to their national
organization, the American Association of University Professors, but Perkins
successfully avoided AAUP censure by demonstrating the extent to which he had
improved salaries and benefits, including retirement benefits, in only a few
years. Although the president scarcely disguised his opinion that many of the
older members of the faculty would outlive their usefulness by the age of
sixty-five, the faculty, which was generally a young group because of the
university's recent rapid growth, was, on the whole, not much disturbed by the
change.

Perkins's interest in individual members of the faculty was very great;
he observed their progress so closely that it was difficult to
persuade him in questions of promotions or leaves against his own judgment. He
was generally accessible, and he was willing to change his mind if persuaded
that his initial reaction was wrong. One faculty restriction that originated
with him was an anti-nepotism rule: two members of the same family could not
be employed by the university unless this employment predated a marriage.
Since women who bore children very often entered the work force later than
men, this rule seriously inhibited the employment opportunities of faculty
wives.

The salary scale adopted by the board of trustees in 1944 had soon
become a victim of the postwar inflation. Perkins made no attempt to establish
another scale, for he preferred a free hand in fixing salaries so that he
could reward merit where he found it. Probably it was from his friends in
industry that he adopted the custom of sending occasional secret bonus
payments, drawn from gift funds, to those he felt to be especially deserving.
In 1962, he created a group of professorships named for H. Rodney Sharp to
honor a few members of the faculty and also as a gesture of appreciation for
the steady accretion of funds from the Sharp Trust. It was Perkins's genuine
intent to raise salaries at least to the point of supporting a faculty member
and his family without forcing him to seek additional income. Indeed, he felt
a faculty member owed full-time service to the institution; if he did not
teach in the summer he should use the time for research and writing, not for a
job unrelated to his profession.

Judge Morris, the president of the board, had been seventy-two when John
Perkins became president, and as Morris's increasing age led him to insist
that he must relinquish his post it was difficult to think of someone of equal
stature to replace him. Such a man was found, however, in Walter S. Carpenter,
Jr., who was chairman of the board of directors of the Du Pont Company in
1959, when, after initial reluctance, he accepted election to the presidency
of the university's board of trustees. Born in Pennsylvania and educated at
Cornell, Carpenter had not even been a member of the Delaware board of
trustees previously. But he had spent most of his adult life in Delaware, he
had married a Delawarean from Sussex County, and he had already (like his
brother, R.R.M. Carpenter) demonstrated by his generosity an interest in the
university. Both Morris and Perkins had to be very persuasive to win
Carpenter's acceptance of the board presidency; he did so, according to
Perkins, only from a sense of duty.

When he accepted the position, Carpenter was already seventy-one years
old, and it was, therefore, clear that his would be a short tenure at the head
of the board. Though he resigned in 1962, when he also resigned as chairman of
the Du Pont Company board, he had, as expected, added to at least the local
stature of the university by his willingness to serve it in this manner.F#19

As Carpenter's replacement the trustees turned to another man very much
out of the same mold as Judge Morris, a member of the judge's old law firm,
which had become Morris, Nichols, Arsht & Tunnell. James M. Tunnell, Jr., was,
like Morris, a native of Sussex County who had spent some time on the bench
(in his case, of the Delaware Supreme Court) and had moved to Wilmington to
practice law. Like Morris again, he was an influential Democrat; his father
had been a U.S. senator. Unlike Morris, he had gone out of the state for his
college education, first to Princeton and then, as a Rhodes Scholar, to
Oxford. His excellent standing in Delaware, where he was one of the most
esteemed lawyers, allowed him to be of considerable service to the university
in difficult times.

In these years John Perkins's boundless energy led him frequently to
accept other posts. For instance, he was editor of a professional journal, the
Public Administration Review, from 1961 to 1963. From 1953 to 1955 he served,
by appointment of President Eisenhower, as United States representative to
UNESCO. In 1956 he accepted appointment as U.S. undersecretary of health,
education, and welfare, and Carl Rees, the provost, became chief executive
officer of the university; no acting president was appointed, however, though
Perkins was in Washington for thirteen months. (Such was Perkins's energy that
he was frequently home in Newark on weekends tending to university business;
he was, after all, still only forty years old.)

An unusual link between the postwar university and old Delaware College
was removed in 1962 with the retirement of Carl J. Rees, the only member of
the faculty who had joined it before Delaware assumed university status in
1921. A veteran of forty-two years at Delaware, barring not only scholarly
leaves but also leave for service in China with the army air force during the
war, Rees was succeeded as provost by John W. Shirley, dean of the faculty at
North Carolina State University, who was also given the title of
vice-president for academic affairs. Rees's second post, as dean of the
graduate school, went to James C. Kakavas, who had been serving as associate
dean.

Another notable change came with the retirement of Charles E. Grubb,
'14, as business administrator in 1958. Here, as in the case of the new
provost, Grubb's successor, Brice Partridge, received a grander title,
vice-president for business and finance. When Partridge left for Johns Hopkins
in 1966, his successor, Randolph Meade, received the same title, and two other
vice-presidents had also been created: George Worrilow had become, as already
mentioned, vice-president for university relations in 1961, and John Hocutt
vice-president for student affairs in 1966.

There were too many new deans to mention all of them here unless to
produce a catalogue; by 1965 the only academic dean whose tenure began before
Perkins became president in 1950 was Irma Ayers, who had succeeded Amy Rextrew
as dean of home economics in 1948. There were also far too many new professors
to permit listing them all, even professors holding endowed chairs, of which
the number was slowly growing. The most distinguished new appointment to the
faculty in this period was that of Robert Hillyer, whose poetry had won him
the Pulitzer Prize and other distinctions. He was appointed to the H. Fletcher
Brown Professorship in Humanities, which position had been established by the
trustees of the Brown estate after the death of Mrs. Brown. On Hillyer's
retirement this professorship was conferred on Marshall Knappen, formerly of
Chicago, Michigan State, and Michigan (where Perkins had known him),
distinguished for his knowledge of both Elizabethan Puritanism and
international relations.

Through these years the reputation of the chemical engineering
department, as developed by Allan Colburn, was retained and even improved
under the leadership, successively, of Robert L. Pigford, Jack A. Gerster, and
Arthur Metzner. Pigford left Delaware to go to the University of California
(Berkeley) but returned after a time, and the department normally was
considered as one of the best five or six in the country--a higher comparative
rank than that of any other department at Delaware.

A mark of the quality of the university's undergraduate programs and
facilities was the establishment of a chapter of the Phi Beta Kappa honor
society in 1954. Of the twenty-seven members of this society on the faculty
when this chapter was formed, it is noteworthy that nine of them were women,
largely holdovers from the faculty of the Women's College.F#20 Phi Beta Kappa
admitted only students of the liberal arts. A number of other student honor
societies recognizing students for leadership, service, or achievement in
particular fields were established at Delaware; among them were Mortar Board
and Sigma Xi, both established in 1960. Tau Beta Pi, the engineering honorary
society, had been established on the campus in 1933.

Despite his unrelenting efforts to win academic distinction for the
University of Delaware, John Perkins found the task very difficult. The years
of his presidency, 1950-67, were years when there was a seller's market for
professors: that is, universities were expanding and jobs were plentiful. A
scholar who established a reputation could easily move to another school if he
chose to. Though they were being improved, salaries, benefits, teaching
schedules, and scholarly associations were not sufficiently attractive at
Delaware to hold all the good young scholars it attracted. To illustrate the
mobility of scholars, at one time former members of the history faculty at
Delaware were serving as chairmen of the history departments at Cornell,
Wisconsin, and California-Davis.

"I never felt satisfied," President Perkins told an interviewer in 1981,
"that we were able to take the great leap, so to speak, to make (with the
resources that we had at hand) the quality of appointments that I aspired to
make. For we entered, as our resources grew, a period when the competition for
faculty was just outlandish, really. Universities and colleges were bidding
for faculty people on the basis of how little they had to teach, particularly
in fields like mathematics and physics. And where we didn't have strong
departments to start with, it was dreadfully hard to recruit strength from
weakness....I tried to husband the money from private resources so that when
the time came [when] more recruits [would be] available than...positions for
them we would have the resources available to recruit [people of] unusual
quality....I often used to say...it was easier to get the money than the good
people."F#21

John Perkins had remarkable success in raising money. According to his
reminiscences, the university had an endowment of about $13 million when he
came and $150 million when he left. It is difficult to substantiate these
figures, which he gave to an interviewer off-handedly, because assessing the
value of endowment funds is a complicated matter. Are land or securities
valued at their price at the time of acquisition, for instance, or at some
later moment? Is money counted as part of endowment only after it is paid or
when it is pledged?

It seems likely that Perkins undervalued his achievements as a
fund-raiser by over--valuing the endowment in 1950. It then consisted of
somewhat more than $5 million (up from $755,000 in 1944), being chiefly the
legacy from H. Fletcher Brown. However, legal measures had been taken in 1950
for the transfer of future income of the Isabella du Pont Sharp Trust to the
university, so the figure given may be based to some degree on the anticipated
income from this source, which turned out to be far more profitable than
expected. At any rate, it is clear that John Perkins saw in his administration
a great increase in the value of the university's endowment, and that though
he was not responsible for all of this increase--Judge Morris, for example,
played a major role in it, and the largest gift, from the Sharp Trust, had
already been arranged for--he still was a remarkable fund-raiser. He saw, as
he said, that when he arrived the university's resources "were terribly
extended trying to provide for agriculture, engineering, and education," plus
many other programs, and he tried to build "a pride in the people of the
State, generally, rich and poor alike, in the University." Fortunately, "it
was a euphoric period in which everybody believed in education and wanted to
see it develop and grow and improve and become available as it had through the
GI Bill of Rights."F#22

Many of the gifts to the university had a specific purpose. The
Carpenter family, for instance, continued the support to athletics--to
facilities, salaries, and scholarships--that they had begun in the early
1940s. Mrs. E. Paul du Pont gave $400,000 to support study of crime,
delinquency, and prevention, and added smaller grants at various times for
projects in the general field of social welfare. Mary Raub (Mrs. Charles)
Evans and her sister-in-law, Lena Evans, gave over $500,000, including Newark
property, especially directed toward the maintenance and equipment of Evans
Hall. S. Hallock
du Pont, as mentioned, supported work in animal husbandry over a long period
of years.

Pierre du Pont's benefactions did not stop with his death in 1954, for
the Longwood Foundation, which he endowed, made numerous gifts to the
construction or enlargement of academic buildings. The Delaware School
Auxiliary, which he had founded, continued its good work in assisting
education through the generosity of his nephew William Winder Laird. Laird was
also donor of valuable land between New London Road and the White Clay Creek
on which a new north campus was built. Ellen du Pont (Mrs. Robert) Wheelwright
arranged to give the university her historic home, Goodstay, on the edge of
Wilmington, with its garden and other grounds (though it did not become
university property until 1969). Wilbur S. Corkran, '10, arranged to give his
historic Rehoboth house, the Homestead, to the university. (In this case, by
the time it came to the university, in 1974, it was in such poor condition
that the university felt it could not afford to repair it and transferred it
to the Rehoboth Art League.)

Henry Francis du Pont funded three faculty positions in fields strategic
to the Winterthur Program--history, English, and art history. After a few
years, Edmond du Pont, through the Averell Ross Foundation, assumed their
support. J. Bruce Bredin and his wife provided substantial assistance to the
work in metallurgy, funding a professorship. The Richards family established a
professorship in American history in honor of Robert H. and Lydia Richards,
one a trustee and the other a member of the advisory committee on the Women's
College.

Charles P. Messick, '07, head of the New Jersey civil service
commission, endowed a professorship in public administration. Lammot du Pont
Copeland, among other gifts, assigned to the university part of the income of
a trust fund that supported graduate fellowships in the humanities for twenty
years, 1962-82. Many other graduate fellowships came to the university from
government agencies, like the National Science Foundation and the National Air
and Space Administration, and through the National Defense Education Act.

Thomas E. Brittingham and his family established and maintained for
years a group of undergraduate fellowships called "Viking Fellowships" for
students from the Scandinavian countries. (Brittingham's gift and that of
Harry Haskell to the University of Delaware Research Foundation have already
been mentioned.) Edith du Pont (Mrs. G. Burton) Pearson made regular gifts to
a fund in memory of her father, Lammot du Pont, for the benefit of the
library. The Crystal Trust, of Irenee du Pont, Sr. and Jr., also made frequent
donations, especially to marine studies. Between 1961 and 1973 over $600,000
was given by the family of Willis F. Harrington, '02, in whose memory a
professorship in chemistry was established. The Du Pont Company made
contributions toward both fellowships and professorships in chemistry and
chemical engineering. Victor C. Records in 1963 gave funds for undergraduate
fellowships that favored students from lower Delaware.

An extraordinarily generous donor through the 1950s and 1960s was Henry
Belin du Pont, a trustee of the university from 1944 to his death in 1970.
Over that period he made gifts amounting in all to several million dollars,
including $1.5 million at his death. His interests
were very broad--ranging from science and technology on the one hand to the
humanities, especially history, on the other. Some of his gifts came through
foundations, and some directly. For several years he supported a professorship
in maritime history. He assisted the university in publishing books. He was
responsible for the gift to the university of a valuable tract of land near
Stanton. His broad interests and devotion to education made him a person to
whom Perkins could appeal when other sources failed, but he was a shy man and
made most of his gifts anonymously, as far as the general public was
concerned.

Another extraordinary friend of the university was Judge Hugh M. Morris,
the long-term (twenty-year) president of the board. His residual estate was
left to the university in 1967, including his home and farm on Polly Drummond
Hill. Another large gift, including the family farm, Morris's Pleasure, near
Greenwood, came to the university on the death of his brother and sister, his
last survivors.

But besides his own generous bequest Judge Morris is generally credited
with interesting many other influential or wealthy people in the welfare of
the university. The most notable among them was Amy du Pont, a distinguished
Delaware horsewoman who moved to Santa Barbara, California, years before her
death in February 1962. When her will was probated it was found that her
multimillion dollar fortune was left to the Unidel Foundation, which had as
its primary responsibility the assistance of the University of Delaware in
establishing or enriching its programs or facilities. Many people read of the
gift with surprise, but Amy du Pont's interest in the university was not new.
From 1939 to 1944 she served on the board of trustees' advisory committee on
the Women's College; she had provided funds for the salary of an extra faculty
member in home economics in the 1930s; and in 1939 through the Unidel
Foundation, which she set up in that year, she purchased a home for the dean
of the Women's College.

In bequeathing her estate to the Unidel Foundation rather than directly
to the university, Amy du Pont, possibly at Judge Morris's suggestion but
certainly with his concurrence, as her lawyer and the university's devoted
friend, was making sure that her gift would go to enhance the work of the
University of Delaware, not merely to sustain it. For there was a danger, as
the endowment grew, that the state legislature might gradually decrease its
support. In that case the purpose of the gifts would be contravened. Donors,
especially donors to the endowment, expected their gifts to improve and
embellish the work of the state university, not to relieve the state of its
responsibility. They hoped to help Delaware to a place of distinction among
American universities, for the advantage of its students and the state as a
whole. They expected to provide frosting for the cake, not the batter. And so
the Unidel board of trustees did not underwrite the ordinary work of the
university; instead this board of which Judge Morris was the first president
and Judge G. Burton Pearson the second, considered special projects submitted
by the university for funding for a finite number of years, as, for example,
the appointment of Malcolm S. Robertson, who came in 1966 from Rutgers (where
he had been on the faculty for twenty-nine years) as Unidel Professor of
Mathematics.

To Rodney Sharp in 1961 John Perkins had written: "My hope is that your
generosity will be an everlasting example to others in Delaware and
beyond--whatever their resources. If we can only capture similar devotion from
a few others, we will continue to hold our place and gain in stature as a
university. In our civilization there is no greater tribute to intelligent
people than their bringing into being a great university."F#23

The gifts of Henry Belin du Pont, of Hugh M. Morris, of Amy du Pont, and
many other benefactors have helped Delaware in the direction that Rodney
Sharp's gifts, in the eyes of John Perkins at least, had pointed this
university.

When he came to Newark in 1950 John Perkins found it hard to believe the
smallness of the annual state appropriation--and this despite the fact that it
had grown considerably in the previous four years since the end of the war.
The tuition, on the other hand, seemed to him to be high for a state
university. He began to work at raising the appropriation and lowering the
tuition, with considerable success. "The legislature was magnificent," he
remembered, "in responding to our request, which was very carefully prepared
and presented, and they supported us very well in all the years that I was
there."F#24

These happy relationships with the state legislature, aided, as has been
explained, by the good reputation of the agricultural extension service and by
the lobbying of Carl Rees and George Worrilow, allowed the fees charged
students to be kept relatively low. In 1950 the general fees amounted to $240
a year, plus $450 for room and board; out-of-state students paid an extra $250
tuition. Small as this seems, Perkins declared it was high for a state
university--the fourth highest charge in the country, he said. Though these
figures all advanced, they did so at a slower rate than in other states; in
1961 Perkins reported that Delaware was only the fourteenth most expensive
state university.F#25 By 1966 the general fee had risen to $315; room and
board to $805; and out-of-state tuition to $750.

The good relations between the university and the state seemed
threatened in 1963-64 when F. Earl McGinnis, Jr., '48, state budget director,
contended that by court ruling the university was a state agency and as such
would have to use regular purchase orders and file a payroll with his office.
Early in the Hullihen administration the state government had sought to have
the university make use of a state system of central purchasing, but Hullihen
had successfully resisted this pressure, which might have unnecessarily
complicated university business.

The annual state appropriation to the university, as it evolved from its
beginning in 1909, was mainly in a lump sum for expenses, though there were
some specific items mentioned, like scholarships and, for many years, support
of the "State of Delaware Chair of History." But there was no specific
line-item appropriation for individual salaries--not even in the chair of
history appropriation--nor for expenditures for particular details of
maintenance. The trustees feared that a close scrutiny of individual salaries
and particular expenditures might lead to interference with the operations of
the university, which had traditionally been kept out of politics and in the
hands of trustees.

The budget director, on the other hand, thought that a close scrutiny of
university finances was his duty. The disagreement was settled in the General
Assembly, where the university called on the persuasive efforts of its
friends, including a number of its trustees, to plead its case. Judge Tunnell,
president of the trustees, who was respected as one of the ablest courtroom
advocates in Delaware, spoke with particular effectiveness before the
legislature and as a result of the arguments that he and other friends of the
university made, the charter was modified so as to clarify the responsibility
of the trustees for direction of the university, even though almost all of the
property had been deeded to the state between 1909 and 1919.

The alteration of the charter, signed by Governor Elbert N. Carvel on
April 22, 1964, assured the university a very high degree of autonomy. It
continued, of course, to function as both a land-grant college and a state
university, and the state government retained the degree of control it had
customarily exercised. The governor and the president of the State Board of
Education (an appointee of the governor) are ex officio members of the board;
the governor appoints eight more trustees; these eight trustees and twenty
elected by the full board (all to six-year terms) must be approved by the
state senate; and, finally, the General Assembly provides annual
appropriations of a very substantial part (but less than a majority) of the
university's income, as well as extraordinary appropriations for such items as
capital improvements.

In 1972 Earl McGinnis was elected to the office of state auditor and as
such conducted an audit of the university's use of state funds. He found, he
testified, that the university had been careful not to commingle those funds
that came from the state with those originating elsewhere.

Relations with other institutions in the state, though generally
harmonious, were not always as smooth as those with the legislature. Although
for a period late in the nineteenth century the president of Delaware College
had been the ex officio president of the State Board of Education and the
college had shown a desire for a close relationship with the public schools,
very few of the public school teachers had attended Delaware College. Except
for one two-year period the legislature had been unwilling to support any
teacher-training program at the college until 1914, when the opening of the
Women's College made Newark a center for teacher training. With the assistance
of Pierre du Pont and the Service Citizens a new connection with the public
schools had flourished, augmented by the summer school, begun primarily for
the benefit of teachers, and the two-year certificate course for elementary
teachers, continued to the Great Depression. Normally, however, the university
did not produce even nearly enough teachers to supply the needs of the
Delaware schools, which drew a substantial number of their teachers, as well
as their administrators, from the numerous Pennsylvania state colleges, like
Millersville, West Chester, and Kutztown, that had originated as normal
schools.

Creation of a School of Education at Delaware with its own dean was
considered a step toward providing leadership for the public schools. Granting
of the M.Ed. degree was authorized in 1950 and in the next year funds from the
Kellogg Foundation (through Columbia
University) and further assistance from the Delaware School Auxiliary allowed
introduction of a program called the "Delaware Project in Educational
Administration," with the object of training teachers for supervisory roles. A
graduate program in guidance and counseling was set up by 1953, along with one
in elementary education, where the number of undergraduate majors had risen to
fifty-five in this year. Education was one of the fields covered by the Ph.D.
program in the behavioral sciences, approved in 1956, though a doctorate in
education per se was not approved until 1970.F#26

However, the rapid expansion of both the university and the public
schools (both, but the latter especially, a reflection of the rapid increase
of the population of Delaware) led to a condition destructive of the valuable
personal contacts that had existed in the 1930s. The time had been, for
instance, when most of the members of the English department and the history
department at the university were known personally to the public school
teachers of these subjects. This contact derived from formal classes,
especially in summer school (teachers being then required to take additional
courses periodically), and partly by attendance at meetings, including those
of the Delaware State Education Association, to which many college professors
belonged.

As time went on, the maintenance of the connection with the public
schools was increasingly left to the faculty of the School of Education. Most
professors dropped out of the DSEA as it raised its dues in order to increase
its effectiveness. In various departments one person would be appointed to
supervise practice teaching in his discipline; the tendency was for his
association to become closer with the School (later College) of Education than
to a subject-matter department.

Not until 1980, when William B. Keene, '55, was appointed, was there a
state superintendent of public instruction who was a graduate of the
University of Delaware. Development, first, of the Women's College and then of
the School of Education, however, had caused the sentiment that had once
existed in favor of the establishment of a separate normal school or teachers'
college to fade away completely.

The segregationist tradition in Delaware that had caused the foundation
of a separate land-grant college for blacks at Dover near the end of the
nineteenth century still was a factor in the midtwentieth century. After the
complete opening of the university to black students in 1950 as a result of
the Parker case, Governor Carvel appointed a commission to study what should
be done with Delaware State College, and two years later Governor J. Caleb
Boggs, '31, set up two committees, one of educators (with university Provost
Allan Colburn as chairman) and one of noneducators, for the same purpose. Each
of these committees came to the same conclusion: there was no justification
for keeping Delaware State College open, now that black students could be
admitted to the university--especially since each student at the Dover college
cost the state between four and five times as much (Delaware State having no
resources of its own) as a student at the university.

Various forces, however, operated to keep Delaware State College in
existence, and even to secure for it more generous appropriations, especially
for capital construction, than it had received in the past.
Its alumni opposed seeing their old school eliminated; some of the faculty
sought continuance of the school to protect their jobs; and both groups and
others made the plausible argument that black high school graduates would find
life at Delaware State easier, in both an academic and a social sense, than at
the university. But probably the most important factor in preserving Delaware
State College was the hope that its continued existence would perpetuate
segregation in higher education in Delaware--not complete segregation, but a
segregation by choice that would be elected by most college-bound black
Delawareans.F#27

The strength of these segregationist sympathies is demonstrated by the
virulent dislike of university sociologists demonstrated by some people in
Delaware. "Every dollar of appropriation to the University should be cut off
until the Department of Sociology is thrown out" was reported as the
conclusion of a diatribe on the subject by a prominent Sussex Countian. He may
have been angered by the testimony of some members of the sociology department
in Chancery Court as "expert witnesses" when it was hearing the Delaware
school integration case. Another provocative event was publication of the
results of a survey conducted by members of a research methods class who were
examining the attitude of Delaware students toward the admission of blacks.
The survey showed that their attitude was very favorable. A report of the
survey was sent to the university's public relations office, but the
administration prohibited its release to the press. However, a member of the
class sent a copy to a Wilmington News-Journal reporter, who published it in
his column.

A state senator who was chairman of the budget committee attacked the
chairman of the department of sociology, Frederick Parker, in the spring of
1957 when the university's budget request was under consideration. The senator
was disturbed by newspaper accounts of a speech that Parker had made in
Washington on fallacious racial beliefs before the local chapter of the
National Conference of Christians and Jews. The Wilmington Morning News
vigorously defended Parker, but it can be seen that at least some elements in
the legislature would have vehemently opposed any merger of the university and
Delaware State.F#28

Agitation for a junior college, which had previously surfaced during the
presidency of W. O. Sypherd, appeared again in the 1960s and disturbed John
Perkins's equanimity. This time the movement for a junior college was linked
to a demand for technological training at a level below the college but beyond
the high school. When the issue of preparing laboratory technicians had arisen
at a board meeting in 1956, John Perkins had been opposed, arguing that the
university had neither the money, the staff, nor the facilities for a
vocational program. But in five years he apparently changed his mind, for in
1961 Academic Extension (by this time called University Extension) admitted
200 students to two-year technical programs in Newark and Georgetown. A year
later Perkins reported that two-year programs in secretarial studies and
agricultural technology were well-enrolled, but that the enrollment in
chemical technology was disappointing.

Probably the reason he changed his mind or at least decided not to
oppose the introduction of two-year vocational programs was fear of
competition for legislative support. The establishment of a junior college or
a technical institute, Perkins thought, would mean a rivalry with the
university, particularly because such schools had a tendency to develop into
four-year colleges. It was an advantage to the university--and, according to
Perkins, an economy to the state--that the university was at once the
agriculture college, the engineering college, the liberal arts college, the
teachers' college, and more, with only Delaware State, for archaic, racist
reasons, as a rival. A state-supported junior college or technical institute
might upset this situation.

In 1964, therefore, in his annual report to the board of trustees,
Perkins announced his intention to start a junior college in Wilmington. A
redevelopment agency, aided by Henry B. du Pont, called the Greater Wilmington
Development Council, had called on the university for such an expansion of its
work, and Perkins, in turn, asked the legislature for the money to begin this
venture. At the same time he announced the popularity of the associate degree
programs (including Associate in Arts programs, not just
vocational-technological ones). In 1964, there were 53 associate degrees
awarded; 181 students were registered in these courses on campus and 213 in
extension. In his plans for further development Perkins went so far as to take
an option on a building in downtown Wilmington and appoint Otis P. Jefferson,
Jr., then assistant director of extension, to prepare to set up a junior
college branch of the university.

However, a new governor who came into office in 1965, Charles L. Terry,
Jr., the former chief justice, had his own ideas. He persuaded the legislature
to establish and fund a new institution, originally called the Delaware
Institute of Technology, with a charter placing no limit on its programs or
degrees, although the title indicated where its main focus was intended to be.
The next legislature changed the name to Delaware Technical and Community
College, and under this name the institution eventually established branches
in all three counties, with the first branch opening in the fall of 1967 in
Georgetown, where a building built as a high school for blacks was made
available as a result of the desegregation of the public schools.

The university was not completely closed out, however. The president of
the new institution, Paul Weatherly, who came from South Carolina, made an
arrangement with the university whereby a two-year academic course was
instituted at Georgetown beginning in September 1967, under the auspices of
the university and carrying full college credit. From its appropriation
Delaware Technical and Community College paid the university to conduct what
was called the College (later the word University was used) Parallel Program.
The students admitted to it had to satisfy all the admission requirements of
the university; indeed, they were admitted to the university, which recorded
their grades and credit hours and kept their other records. If these students
wished to transfer to the Newark campus after a year or two, they could do so
with no trouble, for they were already university undergraduates. The
university, through the appropriate academic departments, hired, paid, and
promoted all the members of the faculty in the Parallel Program. Otis
Jefferson, previously assigned to the aborted junior college in
Wilmington, was now named dean of the Parallel Program, with his office in
Georgetown.

On completion of the two-year program students received either an
Associate in Arts or Associate in Science degree, to mark the halfway point to
a baccalaureate. A second branch of the University Parallel Program was opened
at Delaware Technical and Community College in Wilmington in 1971, but no step
of this sort was taken at Dover, probably because of the presence there of
Delaware State College. While the Parallel Program did not grow as rapidly as
some initial projections suggested, it did prove reasonably popular, its
enrollment growing from 33 in 1967 to about 300 in 1975, and a number of its
graduates made outstanding records after they transferred to the university
campus in Newark.

On campus both graduate and undergraduate enrollments were increasing
rapidly, the former by 84 percent from 1958 to 1963, and the latter by 181
percent over the same period. The percentage of
women in the undergraduate student body rose from 33 percent in 1956 to 40
percent in 1958 and then to 44 percent in 1960, where it remained for several
years. Some acknowledgement of the role of women in campus life was made in
1957, when a coed, Jean Ashe, was elected president of the student government.
This election, however, was the result of a quarrel among the fraternities,
which normally dominated elections because a majority of the students showed
little interest. No other woman was elected to the student presidency until
1968, when, in a period of student unrest, Delma (Dee) Lafferty was elected to
this post.

As in prewar days, the average freshman was eighteen years old, but the
number of commuters was drastically reduced--to twenty-five percent in 1958.
Another change from the prewar situation was that a sizable minority of
undergraduates, just under ten percent, were married. In the same year when
these figures were compiled, 1958, a religious census of the undergraduates
showed that sixty percent were Protestant (Methodists, Presbyterians, and
Episcopalians being most numerous, in that order), twenty percent were
Catholics, and five percent were Jewish.

The number of out-of-state students remained a minority. There were
usually more out-of-state than in-state applicants for admission in the 1960s,
but the number of the former was kept to about twenty-five percent of the
entering class because of lack of housing. It was, therefore, hard for an
out-of-state student to gain admission--in 1964 only one of every eight
out-of-state applicants was admitted--though some advantage was given to
students applying in fields where the facilities (such as laboratories) were
not crowded. Although the number of undergraduates from foreign countries was
small, they formed, in 1959, the Cosmopolitan Club, which was also joined by
some American students. The university appointed a foreign student adviser in
1961, in recognition of the special problems of foreign students.

One aspect of student life that flourished in the 1950s and 1960s was
athletics, under the direction of David M. Nelson, a Michigan graduate. He
came to Delaware in 1951 to replace William D. Murray, director of health,
physical education, and athletics, who resigned to return to his alma mater,
Duke, as football coach. Like Murray, Nelson was brought to Delaware in a dual
capacity, as both football coach and head of the physical education program.

Murray's success might have seemed hard to follow, but Nelson quickly
established himself in both his roles so well that John Perkins was freed of
the worries over athletics and the complaints of alumni that had troubled
Walter Hullihen intermittently for almost two decades. At Delaware the
football teams under Nelson, who had previously coached at Hillsdale College,
Harvard, and Maine, had a record of 84 wins, 42 losses, and 2 ties over a
fifteen-year period, 1951-66. His 1963 football team was undefeated, and three
of his teams had only one loss each. He became a national figure as developer
of what was called the "Winged-T" offense, described in a book he wrote with
Forest Evashevski, then coach at Iowa.F#29 In 1961 he began a long tenure as
secretary of the rules committee of the National Collegiate Athletic
Association, and he served in important roles in many other national and
regional bodies.

While Delaware football teams attracted the most attention, the golf
team, coached by Raymond B. Duncan, '48, who was also assistant director of
athletics, actually had the best record of all Delaware teams in
intercollegiate competition. Many winning records were set by swimming teams
coached by Harry Rawstrom from 1946 to 1981, the longest coaching stint in
Delaware history. C. Roy Rylander also came to Delaware in 1946 but did not
start coaching tennis until 1953. Delaware basketball teams have, on the
whole, not been as successful as those in most other sports, although there
have been some good seasons, including an 18-5 record in 1961-62, when the
team was coached by Irvin Wisniewski, who later made several trips to Poland
under the auspices of the U.S. State Department and the Polish Olympic
Committee to help in the development of basketball there.

In the newest and the oldest intercollegiate sports for men, Delaware
teams made good records. The newest sport is lacrosse. A. Gordon Brewer, '46,
introduced the game on the Delaware campus several years before it became a
varsity sport in 1948. Baseball, the oldest intercollegiate sport, has a good
record at Delaware. Harold R. (Tubby) Raymond, a Michigan graduate, like
Nelson and Wisniewski--and John Perkins--became baseball coach in 1955 and
over the next ten seasons compiled a record of 141 victories and 56 losses. In
1965 Raymond gave up baseball in order to concentrate on football, where he
was Nelson's backfield coach and head assistant. In 1966 Nelson turned over
the duties of head football coach to Raymond, to help dissuade him from
accepting similar offers elsewhere.

Improvement of facilities allowed greater opportunity for physical
exercise and intramural competition. The Delaware Field House was opened in
1956 beside the stadium, and several additions to the Carpenter Sports
Building provided additional basketball courts, as well as squash and handball
courts and an indoor pool. As time passed, these facilities were opened to
women.

Student publications and student dramatic and musical organizations grew
in popularity, like athletics, in these years of increasing enrollment. The
E-52 Players, under Robert Kase's indomitable leadership, sent groups abroad
to tour military bases on three occasions, to the Far East in 1958 and to
Europe in 1961 and 1965. One of the most notable productions on the Mitchell
Hall stage was in 1951 when Professor Cyrus L. Day (English) played the part
of Father, his relative in reality, in Life with Father, based on stories by
Clarence Day. Cyrus Day also adapted Aeschylus's Agamemnon for production on a
program with O'Neill's modern version, Mourning Becomes Electra, in 1956, the
same actors playing parallel roles in the two plays.F#30 As successor to Pambo
and the Humanist, the Cauldron was published until 1954, and was then
succeeded by a new literary magazine, Venture, that ran to 1971 when it in
turn was succeeded by Grover and then by Caesura. The Review increased its
frequency of publication to twice a week and even more often during the hectic
period of student protest that began in 1966.

For most of the first two decades after the Second World War college
students seemed to be, on the whole, a quiet group. The veterans who came to
college after the war were older and more serious than
most other college students and were in a hurry to complete their education in
order to make up for lost time in beginning their careers. The students who
followed them to college in the fifties had been born during the Great
Depression and seemed comparatively uninterested in social and political
issues, particularly when contrasted with the generation that followed. In the
sixties, the era of the "hippies," college students began to show more
divergent types of behavior than in the past, though at Delaware only through
such high jinks as panty raids was the solemn course of events much disturbed
until the middle of the decade.

At many colleges, particularly at those private institutions called the
Ivy League and at major midwestern schools like Wisconsin, sloppy and unusual
dress had become an accepted part of the campus scene even by 1960. But not at
Delaware, where a vigilantly paternalistic administration enforced a strict
dress code as well as an auto ban until 1967; no women, for instance, could
enter the library in pants except in examination periods. "Your students were
the cleanest and most presentable I've encountered," a visitor to many
campuses told John Perkins in 1966.

But times were changing, as Perkins noted in his annual report that
fall. "More of our students are conforming to non-conformity," he wrote.
"There has been a noticeable increase in the number of students unkempt or
bizarre in dress."F#31 The change that was occurring was in more than
appearances and was exemplified by a new group on the campus, a Delaware
chapter of the Students for a Democratic Society, generally known as the SDS.
Antiracist, antimilitarist, antiauthoritarian, the SDS was very critical of
the status quo in American society and, locally, in the administration of the
university.

The origins of the SDS pose a problem that cannot be dealt with here.
The civil rights movement was probably one of its sources and another was the
prolongation of the Vietnam War and the military draft, which meant that many
college students might soon find themselves in the armed forces. It was a time
of prosperity, but the affluence of American society allowed some students to
attend college without much thought of how they wished to earn a living; in
some cases college was a refuge from the draft board. The situation of
students in relation to the draft was quite different from that in 1943. At
the earlier date they understood why military service was required of them.
This time they did not; the Vietnam War was unpopular, and a large proportion
of young men rebelled at the thought of being sent to a Southeast Asian
battlefield.

It is not clear how many of the activities of 1966-67 can be attributed
to the SDS and to what extent other informal campus groups may have been
responsible. Certainly the SDS led a movement against compulsory military
training at Delaware and was in the forefront of antiwar rallies held on
campus in the fall of 1966. Possibly they also were responsible for the
picketing in October of the Newark Country Club, which was charged with racist
bias in admission to membership. In the spring they were also active in
arranging memorial services on campus for Vietnam War dead, as well as other
antiwar demonstrations.

But the greatest success of the SDS on the Delaware campus was in
electing one of their leaders, Ramon M. Ceci, '68, a navy veteran,
to the presidency of the Student Government Association in the spring of 1967.
The SDS had only a small membership, but accumulated grievances and the spirit
of the times allowed the "Student Power" slate, which they supported, to win
not all, but some offices in this election.

Ceci's election, supported by a wave of criticism of those in authority,
was very distasteful to President Perkins. Whether it had anything to do with
his next step is not known for sure; Perkins denied that it did, but surely
the hostility expressed by Ceci and his supporters was discouraging. At any
rate, on June 10, 1967, John Perkins astonished the campus and the state by
announcing his resignation. After turning down several offers of positions
elsewhere, he now accepted the presidency of Dun and Bradstreet, the New York
business information company.

In the summer of 1967 John Perkins was, at fifty-three, still only a
middle-aged man, but after almost seventeen years he had served the third
longest term (surpassed only by Hullihen and Harter) of any Delaware
president. He was, moreover, a forceful, energetic president who drove himself
hard, as he sought to drive others, hoping for the maximum achievement
possible. He welcomed responsibility, even seized it; there was no doubt in
anyone's mind that his was the final authority.

The enrollment, the physical facilities, the faculty, the endowment had
all increased greatly in the Perkins years. The library, in particular,
evidenced his support. With wealthy philanthropists and with the legislature
alike, he had great success in raising money. It was said that he never lost a
major budget request in the General Assembly.

It was his pride that he conducted an efficient operation; in 1963, for
example, he reported that only thirteen percent of the budget went to
operation of the physical plant, whereas the average in sixty institutions was
sixteen percent. He raised faculty salaries and moneys allocated for student
aid, while he tried manfully to hold down fees and other costs to students. He
sought to measure the impact of the university on its students by having the
Graduate Record Examination given yearly to sophomores and seniors. He created
a planning department and initiated such published projects as A 15-Year
Forecast of Students, Staff and Facilities for the University of Delaware
(1957) and The University of Delaware Looks Ahead (1963). His strong
personality and his insistence on personal responsibility marked his
administration as a distinct era in the university's history.F#32

Despite recent student disturbances, which were, after all, rather
innocuous events, his standing with the trustees was very high; his leaving
was entirely his own decision. Perhaps, however, he was gifted with some sense
of premonition, an insight telling him that in the years just ahead it would
be very difficult if not impossible to run a university in the only fashion
that suited him.